This may be a book about one of America’s most magnificent shorelines, but the nature writer Robert Finch isn’t dishing up a breezy beach read. “The Outer Beach” is a collection of more than a half-century of Finch’s observations and ruminations on Cape Cod’s 40-mile eastern coast. And, as his title suggests, Finch is focused squarely on this famed stretch of Massachusetts shore in all its stormy, mutable, awe-inspiring power. The bustling Cape known to summer visitors is eclipsed by the interplay of sea and sand.

Finch is an amiable, if somewhat garrulous, companion as he takes readers on a journey from the island of Monomoy in the south to the wild dune country of the Provincelands in the north. He is a keen and passionate observer, and he knows his natural history — birds, dune grasses, marine mammals. He offers, for example, an affecting description of a herring gull grotesquely hobbled by a fishing lure and his successful efforts to free the creature. And his portrayal of the life he encounters is often vivid, as when the small birds — sandpipers, plovers, sanderlings — that make their living in the intertidal zone are seen “probing in the mud with an energetic stitching motion, embroidering the hem of the tide.”

Later in the book, when he comes across wire structures protecting threatened populations of piping plovers, he laments that a once-abundant bird — known for nesting in shallow, hard-to-spot indentations in the sand — must now be enclosed in cage-like eyesores. “It is the piping plover’s invisibility,” he writes, “the very quality that makes its survival so precarious on our heavily trafficked beaches, that is also part of its essence.”

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The author or co-author of 10 previous books on Cape Cod, Finch is so focused on the nature of the place — as is his intention — that people are often pushed to the side. That’s a shame, because the book contains some touching moments of human interaction. He informs us, almost in passing, that as a college student on the Cape in 1963 he had an affair with a recently divorced mother of four who was 10 years his senior. I certainly wanted to hear more about that.

Finch seems drawn to the coast in its wildest moments, but there’s a lovely scene where he and a companion head to the shore on an August evening as a soft light settles over the seascape: “The beach still seems to ring, vibrate and tremble with the vanished energy and cacophony of the day. That, in fact, is part of its pleasure — the sense of noise and frantic activity recently dissipated, the peace of a classroom just emptied.”

As he leads readers up the Cape, Finch devotes a chapter to each major locale, with his writings arranged in chronological order from 1962 to 2016. This makes for a good deal of repetition. I began to groan as he described yet again the erosion of Cape Cod’s renowned bluffs. And when he uncorked 25 pages on the Cape’s clay cliff formations, I nearly flung the book across the room.

I’m glad I didn’t. In the end, Finch artfully conveys what is, at heart, so stirring about the beach: how its beauty and magisterial power cause us to ponder the larger things in life and drive home our place in the universe. (Hint: insignificant.) “How lucky are we who live in proximity to a landscape that has such easy powers to lift us out of our narrow lives and self-made blinders,” Finch writes, “and so seduce us into seeing who we really are.”

Fen Montaigne is senior editor at Yale Environment 360 and the author of “Reeling in Russia.”